advantage of letting everyone know what is expected of them. But it also lets them know
what is not expected of them. Detailed job descriptions have this two-edged character,
creating many problems when the organization faces changing circumstances that call for
initiative and flexibility in response.
This institutionalized passivity and dependency can even lead people to make and
justify deliberate mistakes on the premise that they're obeying orders. The hierarchical
organization of jobs builds on the idea that control must be exercised over the different
parts of the organization (to ensure that they are doing what they are designed to do),
rather than being built into the parts themselves. Supervisors and other hierarchical forms
of control do not just monitor the performance of workers—they also remove
responsibility from workers, because their function really becomes operational only when
problems arise. In a similar way, a system of quality control on a production line often
institutionalizes the production of defective goods. People realize that they are allowed a
quota of errors.
Much of the apathy, carelessness, and lack of pride so often encountered in the
modem workplace is thus not coincidental: it is fostered by the mechanistic approach.
Mechanistic organization discourages initiative, encouraging people to obey orders and
keep their place rather than to take an interest in, and question what they are doing.
People in a bureaucracy who question the wisdom of conventional practice are viewed
more often than not as troublemakers. Therefore, apathy often reigns as people learn to
feel powerless about problems that collectively they understand and ultimately have the
power to solve.
These difficulties are often linked to another set of problems: the development of
subgoals and sets of interests that undermine the organization's ability to meet its primary
objectives. Functional specialization is supposed to create a system of cooperation. Yet it
often ends up creating a system of competition as individuals and departments compete
for scarce resources or job positions higher up the hierarchy. Empire building, careerism,
the defense of departmental interests, pet projects, and the padding of budgets to create
slack resources may subvert the working of the whole. If the organization is staffed by
rational men and women who behave in accordance with the formal interests and aims of
the total organization, "fitting in" rather than using the organization for other purposes,
then this may not occur. But humans are human, and the best laid plans have a habit of
turning in ways never intended by their creators. Formal organizations thus often become
guided toward the achievement of informal ends, some of which may be quite contrary to
the aims underlying the original design.
A final set of problems relate to human consequences. The mechanistic approach to
organization tends to limit rather than mobilize the development of human capacities,
molding human beings to fit the requirements of mechanical organization rather than
building the organization around their strengths and potentials. Both employees and
organizations lose from this arrangement. Employees lose opportunities for personal
growth, often spending many hours a day on work they neither value nor enjoy, and
organizations lose the creative and intelligent contributions that most employees are